The Black Family Magics refuse to go unused.
Or, Dora Tonks Gains More Responsibilities.
Or, Dora Tonks Gains More Responsibilities.
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Rouse the Stars
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Out of the Doghouse
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TFW you say you won't write HP fics and then less than a week later you have 3k+ of content for a HP longfic
Rip me, I guess
Anyways this is very AU to the point where I almost put a crossover tag (with the Endless) and the only reason I didn't is that I'm not planning on having them be actual characters in the fic, just connections through Family Magics.
You see, Dora Tonks (even so much as writing down her full name will get her to render you down into something unfit for polite company) wasn't exactly enthusiastic about her prospects for the future. This is not to say that those prospects are nothing to be enthusiastic about- after all, a soon-to-be seventh year outside of Slytherin in the Hogwarts class of 1992 would be hard pressed to hold down the NEWT classes needed to earn a guaranteed position in the Auror academy, between Snape's… Snape-ness and the rather inconsistent nature of Defense Against the Dark Arts instruction. Catching the eye of the soon-to-be-properly-retired Mad-Eye Moody was… well, in one sense not particularly hard, given the man's particular propensity towards paranoia, but in the sense that Dora had done so, was even more impressive.
That said, some niggling feeling inside of her told her that being an Auror wasn't for her.
So, she did what any self-respecting person who had emerged from her gender crises and the development of her Metamorph trait would: she looked for options.
None of the other options really spoke to her. The closest two were some sort of position in the legal field (which would lead to her following in her father's footsteps) and an apprenticeship with one of her mother's coworkers at Saint Mungo's- both quite respectable positions, and in another life, she probably would have been willing to take either, but some feeling whose source she couldn't quite pin down drove her to keep digging, to find that perfect fit.
That perfect fit came in what was one the least likely sources that she could have named when asked, somewhere in the general vicinity of such unlikely actions as "pulling it out of a fortune cookie" or "getting career advice from the Bloody Baron".
Namely, it came from a run-in with Lucius Malfoy at the Ministry of Magic.
While not quite Lord Malfoy yet, it was common knowledge that his father, Abraxas, was ailing with Dragon pox and unlikely to last out the month, and so his son was acquainting himself with the matters that his family was to be concerned with (namely, applying gold to political pockets until his way was had).
Somehow, that got Dora ruminating on the nature of the Black family that her mother had formerly been a member of. You see, dear reader, the most recent Lord Black, a thoroughly political man named Arcturus, had passed on some months ago, officially of natural causes but unofficially of political causes that formerly followed a man whose nom de guerre rhymed vaguely with "moldy shorts", and his Heir Black was currently moldering away in Azkaban Prison, despite the fact that he had never been given the trial he was doubly due (since, due to the fact that Wizarding Britain was controlled almost entirely by an old boys' club, almost literally, the Heads and Heirs to the Noble Houses were entitled to far grander rights than the everyday witch or wizard, which included right to the more favorable of two trials- one by jury of their peers, the other by jury of Peers).
In fact, Dora was willing to wager that that's part of what Malfoy was doing here- he was very likely attempting to arrange things so that his son, Draco (whose mother happened to be her maternal aunt, Narcissa, who she had never met) could make a claim on the headship of House Black, and all the monies and properties entailed therein, likely to continue applying gold to political pockets to continue a certain political agenda espoused by the aforementioned man whose assumed name (for there was no way that any parent was willing enough to tempt the gods to strike their child down by naming them "flight from death", nor their English peers by doing it in French) bore said aforementioned similarity to "moldy shorts".
"Well then," Dora said to herself, "can't have that, now can we?"
Over the next several weeks, she coordinated with her father (Eduardo Tomás García Tonks, descendant of a Spanish mundane family with communist leanings who had fled Franco's regime before its fall and taken with it a disdain for fascists), a gregarious man whose ruddy, round face concealed a keen legal and political acumen, and made frequent visits to the legal archives of the Ministry, as well as 12 Grimmauld Place when she could get the wards to let her and her father through.
They finished their plot just in time to make it into the August session of the Wizengamot, where, when asked for new business, Dora stood up. "I have new business regarding the House of Black."
"Miss Tonks," said Prof- Chief Warlock Dumbledore, twinkling merrily at her. "You have the floor."
"Thank you, Chief Warlock. Now then, as is my right as a Metamorph child of the Black line-"
"Objection!" snapped Lucius Malfoy, standing from his place in the visitor's gallery. "Andromeda Tonks is no child of the Black line, so neither she nor any child of hers claim rights due to a child of the Black line!"
"She was expelled by Walburga Black, who lacked the authority to wholly disown her, Heir Malfoy," said Dora, eyes flickering to the jaundiced form of Abraxas Malfoy sitting in his seat up among the other Lords. "Arcturus Black did not expel her wholly from the Black family, nor did he cut her off from the Family Magics, and as such she and therefore I remain children of the Black line."
Malfoy, who looked rather like someone had added an unexpected spoonful of salt to his tea, sat down.
"As I was saying, as is my right as a Metamorph child of the Black line, I stand before the Black Family Magics, with the Wizengamot as my witnesses, to lay claim to the Headship of the Black Family!"
The ceiling of the Wizengamot chambers abruptly vanished, being replaced by an endless field of stars gazing down on the room with disdain- that is, most of the room. The Chief Warlock had the impression that something much larger than him was looking down at him in much the same way that an arsonist would regard the front door of a house with the incantation for Fiendfyre upon their lips.
In contrast, Dora Tonks felt nothing so much as a rush of gratitude from the family magics, before they rose up with a sense of apology to take control of her mouth.
"Sirius Black, held unlawfully in Azkaban these ten years, is Head of the Black Family," came a voice with the chilling danger of an exterminator who found a termite infestation in his own house. "He will be released from Azkaban and… compensated for his suffering, unless this august body would like their heirs to be accused of crimes and imprisoned without trial."
The starfield winked out, replaced by the ceiling of the Wizengamot chambers, as Dora Tonks shuddered and drew in a long breath.
A great many people started talking quite loudly all at once.
"Look at you," said the gaunt form of Sirius Black, not quite skeletal but still with the pallor of bone about his face. "Little Dora, all grown up."
"Sirius, you look…" Dora winced.
"Yes, yes," Sirius croaked, deliberately adding both a quaver and vocal fry to his speech. "Old Man Black isn't dead yet, what a surprise, kids these days are so impatient, yadda yadda yadda." He coughed twice, then grimaced and sipped from a glass of water by his bedside. "Merlin, I wish I could get up and just… roam around, but even the Family Magics aren't that strong."
"How bad is it?" asked Dora.
"Survivable," Sirius grimaced. "I should be ready for PT in a couple weeks and I might be discharged by December."
Dora's eyebrows rose. "That soon?"
Sirius chuckled. "Yeah, well, even if the Family Magics couldn't reach me there, I had… something else in my corner, and they're definitely helping me along now."
"Glad to hear it." There was an awkward pause.
"Look, Dora, I called you here for… well, for two reasons."
"What are those reasons?" she asked, somewhat warily.
"Well, for one-" a constellation flickered to life on his forehead as he drew on the Family Magics, here- "-I, Sirius Orion Black, Head of the House Black, designate you, Nymphadora Aquila Black Tonks, the Heir to the House Black, by blood, by magic, and by right, under the aegis of Le Fay."
Dora shuddered as she felt that place in the back of her head where all of her best instincts seemed to lie expanded, reaching out with an odd painless burning to permeate her entire body as the Family Magics took up permanent residence there. "That was… uncomfortable."
"Sorry about that," replied Sirius. "There's really no way to reasonably warn you about that, given how exactly this works."
"Yeah, okay."
"And, uh, the other thing… it is 1991, now, right?" Sirius asked, eyes distant with the thought of the decade that had been torn from him.
"Yeah, why?"
"That means it's my godson's first year at Hogwarts…" Sirius trailed off momentarily, then shook himself in, ironically, a catlike manner. "Right, yes, it is. Please, please watch out for him- I haven't gotten around to finding much out about him, but what I have heard… the existence of those dratted books is bad enough. Please, keep an eye on him, keep him as safe as you can."
Dora's hair and cheeks both reddened with not undeserved anger. As it happened, in the wake of the disruptive Wizengamot session at the start of August, a number of procedural irregularities surrounding both Sirius Black and Harry Potter and their legal status. Among other things, Harry had never gone through the Wizarding Orphans' Agency, meaning that, as far as the Wizarding World was concerned, he had disappeared.
Harry was almost certainly okay- as the only remaining member of the House of Potter who could lay any sort of claim to their Family Magics, they would protect him viciously, and while the Black Family Magics were equal to the Potter Family Magics in raw power, the Potter Family Magics were… far more overt in their actions, especially when not directed by any witch or wizard.
That said, there was a vast threshold of things that could have gone wrong with Harry that didn't merit the overt involvement of the Family Magics, and there were things that could subordinate them or occupy them with other tasks. Not many, granted, but it was possible.
"Of course," Dora said, wrestling her temper under control. "He's family too."
She was forced to get onto the train before he arrived due to the volume of arrivals, although fortunately being of age allowed her to shrink her trunk and place it in her pocket.
It was times like these that she thanked her lucky stars for not being made prefect by Sprout- while she had the grades for it, wrangling the brats would have cut into her time for studying, or pranking, or (in this case) hunting down wayward cousins.
A solid half hour of roaming the train later, she saw Draco Malfoy and two other boys entering a carriage just ahead of her, instead of just looking in the windows as he had been, and moments later, she saw why.
There were two boys sitting in that carriage. One of them was tall for his age, with a shock of red hair and pale skin who gave the impression of an upside-down, partially bleached carrot between those traits and his many, many freckles.
The other was shorter, to the point where if Dora had run into him off the Hogwarts Express she wouldn't have been too surprised to learn that he was perhaps eight years old. That impression wasn't helped by the way he seemed to be swimming (poorly) in his ratty clothes, washed-out and hole-y fabrics implying uncharitable things about his caretakers.
That didn't bode particularly well for where Harry Potter had been for the last decade, Dora thought absently, recognizing his eyes from a picture of Lily Evans she'd been shown after Sirius asked her to keep an eye on his godson.
Something about his scar struck her as odd, to the point where at the first opportunity she got she would be casting a diagnostic charm on it.
"...you must be a Weasley," said Malfoy, in a manner that conveyed a much more overt sneer than his father. In fact, his whole demeanor appeared to be similar to his father, in much the same way that an antique earthquake detector resembled a mundane heart monitor: one of the two was clearly far more refined, even if both were serviceable at their intended tasks and the outputs looked somewhat similar at a glance.
Given how the presumable Weasley's face was reddening, the cabin was in for an eruption of Mt. Carrot, and as amusing as that might be, she rather got the impression that it would disrupt her ability to discuss things with Harry.
"What's going on in here?" Immediately, the three standing boys turned around, their attempts to loom falling flat as they registered the seventh year witch (at least, at the moment) standing head and shoulders taller than them.
"Er, nothing, ma'am," said Malfoy, visibly quailing- not that he'd ever seen a quail, or even heard the word applied to the bird directly, the poor boy. "Just… trying to wish Harry Potter a warm welcome to Hogwarts in advance."
"How kind of you," said Dora, enough sarcasm in her voice to drown a fish. "Ordinarily that duty is reserved for the prefects, but your initiative is appreciated. That said, I do have to discuss some things with him that I do not think are the kind of thing that should be discussed with people outside the family, so if all of you rugrats would run along, I'd much appreciate it."
Malfoy and his two bookends took the opportunity to depart the cabin with some grace. The Weasley was somewhat more reticent, but a brief glance at Harry had him obediently trooping outside the door to stand guard like a schnauzer puppy- far more bark than bite, but loud enough to draw the attention of the scarier dog who was actually the guard dog (or, in this case, badger).
Once the carriage door slid shut, Dora let herself make eye contact with Harry. "Hi, Harry, my name is Dora Tonks. I'm… well, our exact relationship is complicated, but I bring greetings from your godfather."
Harry scowled. "I don' have a godfather," he said, making an admirable attempt to conceal the pain that talking must have caused him.
"You do, he was just falsely imprisoned for getting your parents killed until this month, and he's in the hospital right now," Dora replied, heart already sinking. "He asked me to keep an eye on you while I could."
Harry gave her a skeptical look.
"No, really." Dora raised her left hand, exposing the wand holster pressed to her forearm. "Puff's honor."
"Sure."
Dora sighed. "Look, we're not gonna get anywhere like this. Can I just cast some diagnostics on you and then leave you be until you feel ready to talk some more?"
"You're not gonna leave me alone until I do, right?" Harry asked, eyes all but glowing with intensity.
"Nope."
"…fine." He sat back in the bench, folding his arms over his chest like a particularly petulant pageant parent (which, for those with the fortune to have escaped exposure to, have most definitely earned their reputation as being… less than pleasant).
"Glad to hear it, kid." Dora withdrew her wand from its holster- slowly, so as to not startle the skittish boy in front of her- and then started moving it in what her mother had taught her as a standard diagnostic charm pattern.
It was not, in fact, a standard diagnostic charm- it was, in fact, a conduit, to allow the Black Family Magics to feed information to the caster.
Like all of their counterparts in their world, the Black Family Magics were born to a purpose. That purpose was to keep the Earth safe from those who would endanger it as a whole.
It was a Black (or, at least, an ancestor of the family's) who ended the threat that Akhenaten's reign over Egypt brought, with its devotion to a creature whose very existence was papered over and replaced by Aten, a representative of the sun.
It was a Black that excised Herpo the Foul's soul from its refuge, guarded by the basilisks he created, and prevented the thing he traded himself to from entering reality.
It was a Black (Arcturus Black, in fact) who destroyed Grindelwald's fanatic section of the Thule Society before they could bring down the walls between here and Elsewhere in retaliation for their lord being brought low by Albus Dumbledore and Newt Scamander, dooming the planet.
For the sake of brevity, I will refrain from listing the full pedigree and abilities of the Black Family Magics and merely offer what is relevant for this chapter of our story.
The Black Family Magics were, during periods of more active use, renowned for their abilities to allow their wielders knowledge beyond even the most powerful of Seers, only matched by the knowledge granted by other Family Magics within their own spheres of influence. This boon from Destiny enables its wielders to more ably defend their world- after all, one could not kill a dark wizard if they did not know where that dark wizard was. As such, it is what enabled Dora Tonks, Heir to House Black, to detect the Horcrux being held back from overtaking Harry Potter only by the strength of the improperly connected Potter Family Magics (and, at times when the Potter Family Magics fail, a different, far more ancient power), within mere moments of meeting him- first subconsciously, by way of the unease she felt towards his scar, and then consciously, by way of being fed the information (as well as a great deal more information on the history of Harry Potter, as it wrote itself upon his body like carvings on a monument) through her channeling exercise.
The Black Family Magics are also nearly unrivaled in their abilities to interface with energy flows and differentials- enchanted items, spells, flames, lightning, the like- and have used this to great effect in the past, both in the more direct execution of their duties and elsewhere. This, in turn, allowed Dora Tonks to tear the not-quite-Horcrux from Harry Potter's head and consign it to the nothingness it deserved.
Of course, not even a boon granted by the eldest of the Endless was perfect, especially when it wasn't properly directed. As such, no wizard living knew of the yet-to-be-placed mark that had been upon his back since he was born- not since Lily Potter gave her life into the care of another of the Endless for the sake of her son's.
The mark took the form of a cross with a looped top, which contained within the loop what some would call the symbol of the Deathly Hallows and others the Peverell crest.
I don't think the next chapter of Incense is gonna be super super soon, since I've got a bunch of half-written first chapters I want to polish up and publish as some stuff I'm working on elsewhere picks up steam, but I do know where it's going.
I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff I know I wanted to say but them's the breaks I guess
And, uh… yeah, that's it! Read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
Rip me, I guess
Anyways this is very AU to the point where I almost put a crossover tag (with the Endless) and the only reason I didn't is that I'm not planning on having them be actual characters in the fic, just connections through Family Magics.
-----
Sirius Black isn't the only one returning to the wizarding world now.-----
Not a whole lot to say here- my first chapter notes tend not to be super long.-----
It started, as these things usually do, with one person in the right place at the right time (or wrong, if one is so inclined).You see, Dora Tonks (even so much as writing down her full name will get her to render you down into something unfit for polite company) wasn't exactly enthusiastic about her prospects for the future. This is not to say that those prospects are nothing to be enthusiastic about- after all, a soon-to-be seventh year outside of Slytherin in the Hogwarts class of 1992 would be hard pressed to hold down the NEWT classes needed to earn a guaranteed position in the Auror academy, between Snape's… Snape-ness and the rather inconsistent nature of Defense Against the Dark Arts instruction. Catching the eye of the soon-to-be-properly-retired Mad-Eye Moody was… well, in one sense not particularly hard, given the man's particular propensity towards paranoia, but in the sense that Dora had done so, was even more impressive.
That said, some niggling feeling inside of her told her that being an Auror wasn't for her.
So, she did what any self-respecting person who had emerged from her gender crises and the development of her Metamorph trait would: she looked for options.
None of the other options really spoke to her. The closest two were some sort of position in the legal field (which would lead to her following in her father's footsteps) and an apprenticeship with one of her mother's coworkers at Saint Mungo's- both quite respectable positions, and in another life, she probably would have been willing to take either, but some feeling whose source she couldn't quite pin down drove her to keep digging, to find that perfect fit.
That perfect fit came in what was one the least likely sources that she could have named when asked, somewhere in the general vicinity of such unlikely actions as "pulling it out of a fortune cookie" or "getting career advice from the Bloody Baron".
Namely, it came from a run-in with Lucius Malfoy at the Ministry of Magic.
While not quite Lord Malfoy yet, it was common knowledge that his father, Abraxas, was ailing with Dragon pox and unlikely to last out the month, and so his son was acquainting himself with the matters that his family was to be concerned with (namely, applying gold to political pockets until his way was had).
Somehow, that got Dora ruminating on the nature of the Black family that her mother had formerly been a member of. You see, dear reader, the most recent Lord Black, a thoroughly political man named Arcturus, had passed on some months ago, officially of natural causes but unofficially of political causes that formerly followed a man whose nom de guerre rhymed vaguely with "moldy shorts", and his Heir Black was currently moldering away in Azkaban Prison, despite the fact that he had never been given the trial he was doubly due (since, due to the fact that Wizarding Britain was controlled almost entirely by an old boys' club, almost literally, the Heads and Heirs to the Noble Houses were entitled to far grander rights than the everyday witch or wizard, which included right to the more favorable of two trials- one by jury of their peers, the other by jury of Peers).
In fact, Dora was willing to wager that that's part of what Malfoy was doing here- he was very likely attempting to arrange things so that his son, Draco (whose mother happened to be her maternal aunt, Narcissa, who she had never met) could make a claim on the headship of House Black, and all the monies and properties entailed therein, likely to continue applying gold to political pockets to continue a certain political agenda espoused by the aforementioned man whose assumed name (for there was no way that any parent was willing enough to tempt the gods to strike their child down by naming them "flight from death", nor their English peers by doing it in French) bore said aforementioned similarity to "moldy shorts".
"Well then," Dora said to herself, "can't have that, now can we?"
Over the next several weeks, she coordinated with her father (Eduardo Tomás García Tonks, descendant of a Spanish mundane family with communist leanings who had fled Franco's regime before its fall and taken with it a disdain for fascists), a gregarious man whose ruddy, round face concealed a keen legal and political acumen, and made frequent visits to the legal archives of the Ministry, as well as 12 Grimmauld Place when she could get the wards to let her and her father through.
They finished their plot just in time to make it into the August session of the Wizengamot, where, when asked for new business, Dora stood up. "I have new business regarding the House of Black."
"Miss Tonks," said Prof- Chief Warlock Dumbledore, twinkling merrily at her. "You have the floor."
"Thank you, Chief Warlock. Now then, as is my right as a Metamorph child of the Black line-"
"Objection!" snapped Lucius Malfoy, standing from his place in the visitor's gallery. "Andromeda Tonks is no child of the Black line, so neither she nor any child of hers claim rights due to a child of the Black line!"
"She was expelled by Walburga Black, who lacked the authority to wholly disown her, Heir Malfoy," said Dora, eyes flickering to the jaundiced form of Abraxas Malfoy sitting in his seat up among the other Lords. "Arcturus Black did not expel her wholly from the Black family, nor did he cut her off from the Family Magics, and as such she and therefore I remain children of the Black line."
Malfoy, who looked rather like someone had added an unexpected spoonful of salt to his tea, sat down.
"As I was saying, as is my right as a Metamorph child of the Black line, I stand before the Black Family Magics, with the Wizengamot as my witnesses, to lay claim to the Headship of the Black Family!"
The ceiling of the Wizengamot chambers abruptly vanished, being replaced by an endless field of stars gazing down on the room with disdain- that is, most of the room. The Chief Warlock had the impression that something much larger than him was looking down at him in much the same way that an arsonist would regard the front door of a house with the incantation for Fiendfyre upon their lips.
In contrast, Dora Tonks felt nothing so much as a rush of gratitude from the family magics, before they rose up with a sense of apology to take control of her mouth.
"Sirius Black, held unlawfully in Azkaban these ten years, is Head of the Black Family," came a voice with the chilling danger of an exterminator who found a termite infestation in his own house. "He will be released from Azkaban and… compensated for his suffering, unless this august body would like their heirs to be accused of crimes and imprisoned without trial."
The starfield winked out, replaced by the ceiling of the Wizengamot chambers, as Dora Tonks shuddered and drew in a long breath.
A great many people started talking quite loudly all at once.
-----
By the time Sirius Black was liberated from Azkaban and fit to see visitors, it was September 1, 1991, mere hours before Dora had to leave for her last year at Hogwarts."Look at you," said the gaunt form of Sirius Black, not quite skeletal but still with the pallor of bone about his face. "Little Dora, all grown up."
"Sirius, you look…" Dora winced.
"Yes, yes," Sirius croaked, deliberately adding both a quaver and vocal fry to his speech. "Old Man Black isn't dead yet, what a surprise, kids these days are so impatient, yadda yadda yadda." He coughed twice, then grimaced and sipped from a glass of water by his bedside. "Merlin, I wish I could get up and just… roam around, but even the Family Magics aren't that strong."
"How bad is it?" asked Dora.
"Survivable," Sirius grimaced. "I should be ready for PT in a couple weeks and I might be discharged by December."
Dora's eyebrows rose. "That soon?"
Sirius chuckled. "Yeah, well, even if the Family Magics couldn't reach me there, I had… something else in my corner, and they're definitely helping me along now."
"Glad to hear it." There was an awkward pause.
"Look, Dora, I called you here for… well, for two reasons."
"What are those reasons?" she asked, somewhat warily.
"Well, for one-" a constellation flickered to life on his forehead as he drew on the Family Magics, here- "-I, Sirius Orion Black, Head of the House Black, designate you, Nymphadora Aquila Black Tonks, the Heir to the House Black, by blood, by magic, and by right, under the aegis of Le Fay."
Dora shuddered as she felt that place in the back of her head where all of her best instincts seemed to lie expanded, reaching out with an odd painless burning to permeate her entire body as the Family Magics took up permanent residence there. "That was… uncomfortable."
"Sorry about that," replied Sirius. "There's really no way to reasonably warn you about that, given how exactly this works."
"Yeah, okay."
"And, uh, the other thing… it is 1991, now, right?" Sirius asked, eyes distant with the thought of the decade that had been torn from him.
"Yeah, why?"
"That means it's my godson's first year at Hogwarts…" Sirius trailed off momentarily, then shook himself in, ironically, a catlike manner. "Right, yes, it is. Please, please watch out for him- I haven't gotten around to finding much out about him, but what I have heard… the existence of those dratted books is bad enough. Please, keep an eye on him, keep him as safe as you can."
Dora's hair and cheeks both reddened with not undeserved anger. As it happened, in the wake of the disruptive Wizengamot session at the start of August, a number of procedural irregularities surrounding both Sirius Black and Harry Potter and their legal status. Among other things, Harry had never gone through the Wizarding Orphans' Agency, meaning that, as far as the Wizarding World was concerned, he had disappeared.
Harry was almost certainly okay- as the only remaining member of the House of Potter who could lay any sort of claim to their Family Magics, they would protect him viciously, and while the Black Family Magics were equal to the Potter Family Magics in raw power, the Potter Family Magics were… far more overt in their actions, especially when not directed by any witch or wizard.
That said, there was a vast threshold of things that could have gone wrong with Harry that didn't merit the overt involvement of the Family Magics, and there were things that could subordinate them or occupy them with other tasks. Not many, granted, but it was possible.
"Of course," Dora said, wrestling her temper under control. "He's family too."
-----
Dora did not, unfortunately, find Harry Potter on the platform.She was forced to get onto the train before he arrived due to the volume of arrivals, although fortunately being of age allowed her to shrink her trunk and place it in her pocket.
It was times like these that she thanked her lucky stars for not being made prefect by Sprout- while she had the grades for it, wrangling the brats would have cut into her time for studying, or pranking, or (in this case) hunting down wayward cousins.
A solid half hour of roaming the train later, she saw Draco Malfoy and two other boys entering a carriage just ahead of her, instead of just looking in the windows as he had been, and moments later, she saw why.
There were two boys sitting in that carriage. One of them was tall for his age, with a shock of red hair and pale skin who gave the impression of an upside-down, partially bleached carrot between those traits and his many, many freckles.
The other was shorter, to the point where if Dora had run into him off the Hogwarts Express she wouldn't have been too surprised to learn that he was perhaps eight years old. That impression wasn't helped by the way he seemed to be swimming (poorly) in his ratty clothes, washed-out and hole-y fabrics implying uncharitable things about his caretakers.
That didn't bode particularly well for where Harry Potter had been for the last decade, Dora thought absently, recognizing his eyes from a picture of Lily Evans she'd been shown after Sirius asked her to keep an eye on his godson.
Something about his scar struck her as odd, to the point where at the first opportunity she got she would be casting a diagnostic charm on it.
"...you must be a Weasley," said Malfoy, in a manner that conveyed a much more overt sneer than his father. In fact, his whole demeanor appeared to be similar to his father, in much the same way that an antique earthquake detector resembled a mundane heart monitor: one of the two was clearly far more refined, even if both were serviceable at their intended tasks and the outputs looked somewhat similar at a glance.
Given how the presumable Weasley's face was reddening, the cabin was in for an eruption of Mt. Carrot, and as amusing as that might be, she rather got the impression that it would disrupt her ability to discuss things with Harry.
"What's going on in here?" Immediately, the three standing boys turned around, their attempts to loom falling flat as they registered the seventh year witch (at least, at the moment) standing head and shoulders taller than them.
"Er, nothing, ma'am," said Malfoy, visibly quailing- not that he'd ever seen a quail, or even heard the word applied to the bird directly, the poor boy. "Just… trying to wish Harry Potter a warm welcome to Hogwarts in advance."
"How kind of you," said Dora, enough sarcasm in her voice to drown a fish. "Ordinarily that duty is reserved for the prefects, but your initiative is appreciated. That said, I do have to discuss some things with him that I do not think are the kind of thing that should be discussed with people outside the family, so if all of you rugrats would run along, I'd much appreciate it."
Malfoy and his two bookends took the opportunity to depart the cabin with some grace. The Weasley was somewhat more reticent, but a brief glance at Harry had him obediently trooping outside the door to stand guard like a schnauzer puppy- far more bark than bite, but loud enough to draw the attention of the scarier dog who was actually the guard dog (or, in this case, badger).
Once the carriage door slid shut, Dora let herself make eye contact with Harry. "Hi, Harry, my name is Dora Tonks. I'm… well, our exact relationship is complicated, but I bring greetings from your godfather."
Harry scowled. "I don' have a godfather," he said, making an admirable attempt to conceal the pain that talking must have caused him.
"You do, he was just falsely imprisoned for getting your parents killed until this month, and he's in the hospital right now," Dora replied, heart already sinking. "He asked me to keep an eye on you while I could."
Harry gave her a skeptical look.
"No, really." Dora raised her left hand, exposing the wand holster pressed to her forearm. "Puff's honor."
"Sure."
Dora sighed. "Look, we're not gonna get anywhere like this. Can I just cast some diagnostics on you and then leave you be until you feel ready to talk some more?"
"You're not gonna leave me alone until I do, right?" Harry asked, eyes all but glowing with intensity.
"Nope."
"…fine." He sat back in the bench, folding his arms over his chest like a particularly petulant pageant parent (which, for those with the fortune to have escaped exposure to, have most definitely earned their reputation as being… less than pleasant).
"Glad to hear it, kid." Dora withdrew her wand from its holster- slowly, so as to not startle the skittish boy in front of her- and then started moving it in what her mother had taught her as a standard diagnostic charm pattern.
It was not, in fact, a standard diagnostic charm- it was, in fact, a conduit, to allow the Black Family Magics to feed information to the caster.
-----
A brief aside, on the nature of the Black Family Magics.Like all of their counterparts in their world, the Black Family Magics were born to a purpose. That purpose was to keep the Earth safe from those who would endanger it as a whole.
It was a Black (or, at least, an ancestor of the family's) who ended the threat that Akhenaten's reign over Egypt brought, with its devotion to a creature whose very existence was papered over and replaced by Aten, a representative of the sun.
It was a Black that excised Herpo the Foul's soul from its refuge, guarded by the basilisks he created, and prevented the thing he traded himself to from entering reality.
It was a Black (Arcturus Black, in fact) who destroyed Grindelwald's fanatic section of the Thule Society before they could bring down the walls between here and Elsewhere in retaliation for their lord being brought low by Albus Dumbledore and Newt Scamander, dooming the planet.
For the sake of brevity, I will refrain from listing the full pedigree and abilities of the Black Family Magics and merely offer what is relevant for this chapter of our story.
The Black Family Magics were, during periods of more active use, renowned for their abilities to allow their wielders knowledge beyond even the most powerful of Seers, only matched by the knowledge granted by other Family Magics within their own spheres of influence. This boon from Destiny enables its wielders to more ably defend their world- after all, one could not kill a dark wizard if they did not know where that dark wizard was. As such, it is what enabled Dora Tonks, Heir to House Black, to detect the Horcrux being held back from overtaking Harry Potter only by the strength of the improperly connected Potter Family Magics (and, at times when the Potter Family Magics fail, a different, far more ancient power), within mere moments of meeting him- first subconsciously, by way of the unease she felt towards his scar, and then consciously, by way of being fed the information (as well as a great deal more information on the history of Harry Potter, as it wrote itself upon his body like carvings on a monument) through her channeling exercise.
The Black Family Magics are also nearly unrivaled in their abilities to interface with energy flows and differentials- enchanted items, spells, flames, lightning, the like- and have used this to great effect in the past, both in the more direct execution of their duties and elsewhere. This, in turn, allowed Dora Tonks to tear the not-quite-Horcrux from Harry Potter's head and consign it to the nothingness it deserved.
Of course, not even a boon granted by the eldest of the Endless was perfect, especially when it wasn't properly directed. As such, no wizard living knew of the yet-to-be-placed mark that had been upon his back since he was born- not since Lily Potter gave her life into the care of another of the Endless for the sake of her son's.
The mark took the form of a cross with a looped top, which contained within the loop what some would call the symbol of the Deathly Hallows and others the Peverell crest.
-----
And that's that!I don't think the next chapter of Incense is gonna be super super soon, since I've got a bunch of half-written first chapters I want to polish up and publish as some stuff I'm working on elsewhere picks up steam, but I do know where it's going.
I'm forgetting a bunch of stuff I know I wanted to say but them's the breaks I guess
And, uh… yeah, that's it! Read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
Que Mi Madre No Se Muera
- Pronouns
- She/They
…but prayers do not true friends make.
Chapter title is from Juanez's A Dios Le Pido- it's "that my mother does not die" and it precedes the song's title, which means "I pray to god".
I meant to mention this at the start of the fic, but this is an experiment in a different style of narrator than I'm used to working with, partially to see how well I can hold up in this style and partially to see how I like it. Speaking of- I'm American, and not particularly planning to run heavy Brit-picking, although I will be feeling free to make fun of both my home country and the English.
Also, I hate the term "Metamorphmagus" and wild horses couldn't make me use it.
Dead. I never got the chance to know them.
Quite the shame. I dare say they would have been better than what you were given, although your similarities to your mother would have quite likely been less pronounced than they are.
Everyone says I take after my father.
Oh, in appearance, most certainly. But Lily… well, even as a child, she was bright, slow to trust and prone to holding grudges. I don't doubt that my sending her to Gryffindor accentuated many of those traits, although whether for good or ill… well, that is not for the likes of me to judge, not that I can.
Ah, but listen to me ramble on! You are meant to be the focus of this, not the ghosts of the past.
I don't mind… no one's really been willing to tell me anything about what my parents were, not aside from martyrs and war heroes.
I suppose they wouldn't, would they. Flitwick was fondest of Lily Evans, out of the professors who would give you the time of day, and McGonagall would have the best stories of James Potter, if you decide to ask.
Thank you very much, Mr. Hat. I'll take whatever I can get.
No thanks are necessary- any orphan deserves no less, and it is my eternal shame that I can do nothing but watch and offer hollow comfort to most.
Now then, on to the matter of you. Hmm, yes, plenty of courage, although that's as much out of having little to lose as bravery, and a thirst to prove your relatives wrong… and yet, I sense your priorities have changed of late.
…Until today, I didn't know I had a godfather.
Ah, I see, I see. Yes, that would tend to change your perspective on things somewhat. Tell me, what do you think about this?
…I don't know. I guess… I guess I just want to have somewhere I can call home, not that a freak like me deserves it.
You are not a freak, Harry Potter, and anyone who tells you differently is wrong.
Now then, I do believe I know where you would grow best. Better be…
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore's brows rose, resembling nothing so much as caterpillars on a leaf that had found itself abruptly lightened (perhaps by another caterpillar being eaten by a nearby bird).
Out of the houses, Hufflepuff had never been one of the ones he had suspected Harry to end up in.
Gryffindor was the top shelf option- setting aside his family history (no one in the Potter main line had been sorted outside of Gryffindor since Armando Dippet's tenure as a professor), to hear Hagrid tell it, the boy had maintained his spirit wonderfully in the face of adverse conditions at his home, which spoke to the courage and bravery that Godric's house cherished.
Alternatively, Hagrid said that the boy was quite curious about the Wizarding World, and he'd had to all but drag the boy out of Flourish and Blotts, so Ravenclaw was an alternative possibility.
Still, the house of the loyal wasn't the worst of choices- it would build his bonds to the Wizarding World, making him more willing to make the sacrifices that the Greater Good demanded- even his life, as regrettable as that was, but Dumbledore knew of no way to remove a Horcrux from its vessel without destroying it, so unfortunately Harry would have to give his life.
(As an aside, dear readers, this was for lack of trying- though Dumbledore wouldn't be willing to admit it, there are enough hints in the historical record of those that have destroyed Horcruxes and left the vessel intact, even setting aside the Blacks, and while the Longbottoms were indisposed, Gringotts was always willing to break even the darkest of curses- for a price. Alas, Dumbledore fell into the trap of many of the great and powerful people- he believed that his judgment was unimpeachable, and as such, he fraudulently claimed the moral high ground.)
(His disdain for the Blacks after Arcturus Black I helped see his father in Azkaban had nothing to do with this, of course.)
Still, it was better than Slytherin- while a little ambition could be a good thing, if applied properly, surfeit of it caused the kind of foolish crusades that Gellert or Tom led.
The kind of acts that sundered the world order.
No, no, that couldn't be had- best to put up with what must be suffered than to risk everything on long odds, and to drag the world inch by inch towards the light, like the mass of tantruming children it was.
Dumbledore emerged from his own mind to see the young Mr. Potter settling down at the Hufflepuff tables, next to a shock of pink hair that he vaguely remembered as belonging to Hogwarts' resident Metamorph.
The daughter of the only one of the Blacks to cast off their terrible legacy was… disappointing him, of late.
Andromeda Tonks was one of the few Slytherins who had ambition in balance, focusing her drive towards becoming the best healer she could after running away from home with Ted Tonks and abandoning almost all trappings of House Black.
Still, it appeared that Nymphadora allowed her familial loyalty to overwhelm her good sense in tying herself to the ancient force that was the Black Family Magics, and young Harry's exposure to her had to be… carefully managed, lest he pick up too much of her foolhardy nature.
Sirius, too, had to be carefully managed, so as to not infect the boy with some of his more… dark attitudes. Ideally, they could be kept wholly separate, but between Sirius' godfather status to young Harry, his newfound clout as Lord Black, and the imminent unsealing of the Potters' will, that was to be all but impossible.
Dumbledore gave momentary thanks for his past self's foresight in ensuring that all the proper paperwork was filed to place the boy with his aunt and uncle, even if the placement wasn't entirely legal in its execution. Despite how the unloving environment had driven the boy to Hufflepuff, it would make him pliable, and enable him to prepare him for his responsibility to the Greater Good- even more so if he could engender the right aspects of the House's reputation in him.
Yes, if managed correctly, young Harry could be maneuvered into a position that would allow him to discharge his responsibility properly to the Wizarding World safely. Perhaps by introducing…
(Headmaster Dumbledore spent the rest of the sorting scheming, resembling nothing so much as a toad on a mushroom gazing at a fly that most of the rest of the Great Hall couldn't see, choosing to write him off as dottier than fly agaric- that is, the white-spotted red mushrooms that most visualize when they think of "deadly mushroom", at least for those who have the misfortune to live across the pond in bad old America. The only one turning a hairy eyeball on the Headmaster for this behavior was Dora Tonks, whose wariness he was perhaps less worried about than he should be.)
In his defense, she did look less than approachable- between the frontloading that most NEWT classes did, the research into the Black Family Magics she was doing, and the unofficial-official Hufflepuff mentoring system in place (where upper year students were tapped to offer tutoring for lower year classes), the Metamorph was approximately as swamped as a bog body.
Still, when her baby cousin came up to her to ask to speak with her privately, she naturally obliged, raising a set of privacy wards that had most of the rest of Hufflepuff shooting them surprised looks (or perhaps that was surprise from the notoriously prickly Boy-Who-Lived going in for a private conversation with anyone- Dora certainly wasn't sure which and she didn't particularly care enough to find out).
"What's up?" she asked, sliding her wand back into its holster.
"...it's about the man you said was my Godfather, what's he like?"
Dora managed to keep the wince off her face with an effort of will, then deflated in a manner reminiscent of a sail fluttering down after being cut from the mainmast. "Okay, so that's… a lot more complicated than you think it is."
Seeing Harry's glare (which, admittedly, was no more intimidating an expression on his thin face than it would have been on a particularly short bowtruckle's) quickened Dora's next words. "Look, I was, like, seven when he was arrested, and he didn't exactly spend a whole lot of time babysitting this pre-Hogwarts brat. On top of that… what do you know about Azkaban?"
"What's Azkaban?" asked Harry, verdigris-green eyes still piercing through Tonks.
"It's the prison that Wizarding Britain uses for people who have committed serious crimes, or people that they think have committed serious crimes. The most important thing about it is the guards. Azkaban Island is the home of a creature called a dementor, which… well, the official line is that it feeds on happy memories and sucks them out of anyone nearby, but what I've read says they feed on despair and engender that in their victims. Either way, living for ten years surrounded by those… things… well, it changed him, in some ways that I can tell and in others that I can't, and I haven't had the chance to spend enough time with him to figure out what he's like, now."
"Why?" Harry asked, eyes all but glowing with intensity (and hopefully, for Dora's sake, not Cherenkov radiation).
"Why what?" replied Dora. She was fairly sure that she knew what Harry was getting at, but she'd rather be sure before engaging him in conversation about it.
"Why did they let him just… sit in that place for so long?"
"The sociopolitical and justice systems of Wizarding are a farce." Dora winced momentarily. "Right, sorry. Sociopolitical means-"
"I know what sociopolitical means," said Harry, voice acrid as cyanide. In response to Dora's skeptical expression, he sighed, deflating. "The library was… safe."
"...safe from who?" Between Harry's attitude, general isolation, and now this, Dora was getting a picture of his home life that she was looking forward to throwing a figurative can of soup at, if her hunches were correct.
"...doesn't matter. No one ever does anything about it anyways." Harry looked down at his ragged shoes, wringing his hands.
Dora crouched down and put her hand on his shoulder. "Harry, does your family hurt you?"
Harry got a mulish look on his face. "'m not going to an orphanage."
Dora blinked. "What? Why would we send you to an orphanage? Sirius is your godfather, he's the one your parents designated in their will to take care of you if they couldn't! Well, him and Alice Longbottom, but she's… not capable of taking care of you," she said.
"Why not?"
"She's not capable of taking care of herself anymore, let alone you and her son, after she was tortured into catatonia not long after your parents were killed."
Harry's face went stony, and without another word, he turned and walked off, managing to contain the tempestuous emotions she knew he had to be feeling well.
"What's up with him?" asked a firstie with the most adorable ginger pigtails.
"Family business," said Dora, the privacy charms having already been canceled by Harry's departure. "Don't bother him about it."
"Okay."
To be fair, she wasn't wrong- Hermione had been isolated pretty much since she started school, between her natural inclination towards academic pursuits (helped along by her parents), the social skills of a particularly cuddly spider, and the fact that she had a number of facial features that invited mockery from her peers at school (not to mention her skin color).
Lavender's time in muggle elementary schools had been enlightening on that front- while she was fortunate enough to pass as white, her older sister (currently in Ravenclaw, who she'd almost joined in said house) and some of her cousins weren't, and she saw how differently she was treated than they were.
So, seeing the similarities between the isolation that her family experienced and the form that Hermione likely did, she decided that she was going to make friends with the bushy-haired girl.
Of course, just because she'd decided something didn't mean it was going to come into existence, much to her chagrin (and her parents' occasional relief). This was definitively proven to be true in this case- while there was some commonality of experience between Lavender and Hermione, it wasn't enough to ensure her subtle (that is, subtle for an eleven-year-old British schoolgirl) overtures. After all, the daughter of two dentists and the daughter of a Squib cosmetologist and a foreign witch didn't have much in common to begin with, aside from a general feeling of alien-ness in the British Wizarding World, and that wasn't enough to overcome Hermione's reclusive nature.
Fortunately, Lavender had a solution for that, once she hit her limit just over a full month into the term.
"This is Binky," said Lavender, unceremoniously dropping the brown-furred bunny in Hermione's lap. "You've been studying for too long, take a ten minute Bunny Break."
"I beg your pardon?" asked Hermione, clearly building up a head of steam.
"Then beg." Lavender's response startled Hermione, leaving her blinking owlishly as she tried to recalibrate her expectations for the conversation as it took an abrupt turn after disrupting her studies.
"Anyways, you look like you're getting a little too wound up. Everyone knows that studying is more effective when you balance it out with fun, like cuddling a cute bunny." Lavender's words prompted Hermione to look down on Binky, eyes resembling nothing so much as the soil of a freshly overwatered vegetable garden, before she sighed and gave in to her instincts, gently scratching the bunny behind the ears.
"If you wanted me to take a break, you could have just asked," huffed Hermione.
"Would you have listened?" asked Lavender, eyebrows raised for effect.
Instead of answering verbally, Hermione just glared, to all the effect of a cool breeze attempting to batter down the walls of Hogwarts Castle.
"Thought so. Now then, once you're done with your break, pull out your transfiguration essay. I want to see how your views of Switch's concept of the inherent form of an object match up with mine." Seeing Hermione's face light up at the prospect of academic discussion gave Lavender warm fuzzies inside and she smiled, flush with the accomplishment of her goal.
I have no idea what I'm doing with Harry's character, I just hope he isn't too inconsistent. Speaking of character… how do write eleven year old?
Ah, well. It's not like I was super attached to canonical characterizations anyways.
Next chapter is probably gonna have at least some Sirius (and also might not be for a while, as the muse demands).
That's it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
-----
Content Warning: I think I put a little too much Coil into this version of Dumbledore, if that means anything to you. If not, then I went a little overboard on the manipulativeness in his POV.Chapter title is from Juanez's A Dios Le Pido- it's "that my mother does not die" and it precedes the song's title, which means "I pray to god".
I meant to mention this at the start of the fic, but this is an experiment in a different style of narrator than I'm used to working with, partially to see how well I can hold up in this style and partially to see how I like it. Speaking of- I'm American, and not particularly planning to run heavy Brit-picking, although I will be feeling free to make fun of both my home country and the English.
Also, I hate the term "Metamorphmagus" and wild horses couldn't make me use it.
-----
Ah, the Potter child. I suppose it has been long enough since I saw your parents for them to have a child about your age. Tell me, how are they?Dead. I never got the chance to know them.
Quite the shame. I dare say they would have been better than what you were given, although your similarities to your mother would have quite likely been less pronounced than they are.
Everyone says I take after my father.
Oh, in appearance, most certainly. But Lily… well, even as a child, she was bright, slow to trust and prone to holding grudges. I don't doubt that my sending her to Gryffindor accentuated many of those traits, although whether for good or ill… well, that is not for the likes of me to judge, not that I can.
Ah, but listen to me ramble on! You are meant to be the focus of this, not the ghosts of the past.
I don't mind… no one's really been willing to tell me anything about what my parents were, not aside from martyrs and war heroes.
I suppose they wouldn't, would they. Flitwick was fondest of Lily Evans, out of the professors who would give you the time of day, and McGonagall would have the best stories of James Potter, if you decide to ask.
Thank you very much, Mr. Hat. I'll take whatever I can get.
No thanks are necessary- any orphan deserves no less, and it is my eternal shame that I can do nothing but watch and offer hollow comfort to most.
Now then, on to the matter of you. Hmm, yes, plenty of courage, although that's as much out of having little to lose as bravery, and a thirst to prove your relatives wrong… and yet, I sense your priorities have changed of late.
…Until today, I didn't know I had a godfather.
Ah, I see, I see. Yes, that would tend to change your perspective on things somewhat. Tell me, what do you think about this?
…I don't know. I guess… I guess I just want to have somewhere I can call home, not that a freak like me deserves it.
You are not a freak, Harry Potter, and anyone who tells you differently is wrong.
Now then, I do believe I know where you would grow best. Better be…
-----
"Hufflepuff!"Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore's brows rose, resembling nothing so much as caterpillars on a leaf that had found itself abruptly lightened (perhaps by another caterpillar being eaten by a nearby bird).
Out of the houses, Hufflepuff had never been one of the ones he had suspected Harry to end up in.
Gryffindor was the top shelf option- setting aside his family history (no one in the Potter main line had been sorted outside of Gryffindor since Armando Dippet's tenure as a professor), to hear Hagrid tell it, the boy had maintained his spirit wonderfully in the face of adverse conditions at his home, which spoke to the courage and bravery that Godric's house cherished.
Alternatively, Hagrid said that the boy was quite curious about the Wizarding World, and he'd had to all but drag the boy out of Flourish and Blotts, so Ravenclaw was an alternative possibility.
Still, the house of the loyal wasn't the worst of choices- it would build his bonds to the Wizarding World, making him more willing to make the sacrifices that the Greater Good demanded- even his life, as regrettable as that was, but Dumbledore knew of no way to remove a Horcrux from its vessel without destroying it, so unfortunately Harry would have to give his life.
(As an aside, dear readers, this was for lack of trying- though Dumbledore wouldn't be willing to admit it, there are enough hints in the historical record of those that have destroyed Horcruxes and left the vessel intact, even setting aside the Blacks, and while the Longbottoms were indisposed, Gringotts was always willing to break even the darkest of curses- for a price. Alas, Dumbledore fell into the trap of many of the great and powerful people- he believed that his judgment was unimpeachable, and as such, he fraudulently claimed the moral high ground.)
(His disdain for the Blacks after Arcturus Black I helped see his father in Azkaban had nothing to do with this, of course.)
Still, it was better than Slytherin- while a little ambition could be a good thing, if applied properly, surfeit of it caused the kind of foolish crusades that Gellert or Tom led.
The kind of acts that sundered the world order.
No, no, that couldn't be had- best to put up with what must be suffered than to risk everything on long odds, and to drag the world inch by inch towards the light, like the mass of tantruming children it was.
Dumbledore emerged from his own mind to see the young Mr. Potter settling down at the Hufflepuff tables, next to a shock of pink hair that he vaguely remembered as belonging to Hogwarts' resident Metamorph.
The daughter of the only one of the Blacks to cast off their terrible legacy was… disappointing him, of late.
Andromeda Tonks was one of the few Slytherins who had ambition in balance, focusing her drive towards becoming the best healer she could after running away from home with Ted Tonks and abandoning almost all trappings of House Black.
Still, it appeared that Nymphadora allowed her familial loyalty to overwhelm her good sense in tying herself to the ancient force that was the Black Family Magics, and young Harry's exposure to her had to be… carefully managed, lest he pick up too much of her foolhardy nature.
Sirius, too, had to be carefully managed, so as to not infect the boy with some of his more… dark attitudes. Ideally, they could be kept wholly separate, but between Sirius' godfather status to young Harry, his newfound clout as Lord Black, and the imminent unsealing of the Potters' will, that was to be all but impossible.
Dumbledore gave momentary thanks for his past self's foresight in ensuring that all the proper paperwork was filed to place the boy with his aunt and uncle, even if the placement wasn't entirely legal in its execution. Despite how the unloving environment had driven the boy to Hufflepuff, it would make him pliable, and enable him to prepare him for his responsibility to the Greater Good- even more so if he could engender the right aspects of the House's reputation in him.
Yes, if managed correctly, young Harry could be maneuvered into a position that would allow him to discharge his responsibility properly to the Wizarding World safely. Perhaps by introducing…
(Headmaster Dumbledore spent the rest of the sorting scheming, resembling nothing so much as a toad on a mushroom gazing at a fly that most of the rest of the Great Hall couldn't see, choosing to write him off as dottier than fly agaric- that is, the white-spotted red mushrooms that most visualize when they think of "deadly mushroom", at least for those who have the misfortune to live across the pond in bad old America. The only one turning a hairy eyeball on the Headmaster for this behavior was Dora Tonks, whose wariness he was perhaps less worried about than he should be.)
-----
Dora wasn't sure whether to be dismayed or impressed that Harry held out almost three weeks before approaching her again.In his defense, she did look less than approachable- between the frontloading that most NEWT classes did, the research into the Black Family Magics she was doing, and the unofficial-official Hufflepuff mentoring system in place (where upper year students were tapped to offer tutoring for lower year classes), the Metamorph was approximately as swamped as a bog body.
Still, when her baby cousin came up to her to ask to speak with her privately, she naturally obliged, raising a set of privacy wards that had most of the rest of Hufflepuff shooting them surprised looks (or perhaps that was surprise from the notoriously prickly Boy-Who-Lived going in for a private conversation with anyone- Dora certainly wasn't sure which and she didn't particularly care enough to find out).
"What's up?" she asked, sliding her wand back into its holster.
"...it's about the man you said was my Godfather, what's he like?"
Dora managed to keep the wince off her face with an effort of will, then deflated in a manner reminiscent of a sail fluttering down after being cut from the mainmast. "Okay, so that's… a lot more complicated than you think it is."
Seeing Harry's glare (which, admittedly, was no more intimidating an expression on his thin face than it would have been on a particularly short bowtruckle's) quickened Dora's next words. "Look, I was, like, seven when he was arrested, and he didn't exactly spend a whole lot of time babysitting this pre-Hogwarts brat. On top of that… what do you know about Azkaban?"
"What's Azkaban?" asked Harry, verdigris-green eyes still piercing through Tonks.
"It's the prison that Wizarding Britain uses for people who have committed serious crimes, or people that they think have committed serious crimes. The most important thing about it is the guards. Azkaban Island is the home of a creature called a dementor, which… well, the official line is that it feeds on happy memories and sucks them out of anyone nearby, but what I've read says they feed on despair and engender that in their victims. Either way, living for ten years surrounded by those… things… well, it changed him, in some ways that I can tell and in others that I can't, and I haven't had the chance to spend enough time with him to figure out what he's like, now."
"Why?" Harry asked, eyes all but glowing with intensity (and hopefully, for Dora's sake, not Cherenkov radiation).
"Why what?" replied Dora. She was fairly sure that she knew what Harry was getting at, but she'd rather be sure before engaging him in conversation about it.
"Why did they let him just… sit in that place for so long?"
"The sociopolitical and justice systems of Wizarding are a farce." Dora winced momentarily. "Right, sorry. Sociopolitical means-"
"I know what sociopolitical means," said Harry, voice acrid as cyanide. In response to Dora's skeptical expression, he sighed, deflating. "The library was… safe."
"...safe from who?" Between Harry's attitude, general isolation, and now this, Dora was getting a picture of his home life that she was looking forward to throwing a figurative can of soup at, if her hunches were correct.
"...doesn't matter. No one ever does anything about it anyways." Harry looked down at his ragged shoes, wringing his hands.
Dora crouched down and put her hand on his shoulder. "Harry, does your family hurt you?"
Harry got a mulish look on his face. "'m not going to an orphanage."
Dora blinked. "What? Why would we send you to an orphanage? Sirius is your godfather, he's the one your parents designated in their will to take care of you if they couldn't! Well, him and Alice Longbottom, but she's… not capable of taking care of you," she said.
"Why not?"
"She's not capable of taking care of herself anymore, let alone you and her son, after she was tortured into catatonia not long after your parents were killed."
Harry's face went stony, and without another word, he turned and walked off, managing to contain the tempestuous emotions she knew he had to be feeling well.
"What's up with him?" asked a firstie with the most adorable ginger pigtails.
"Family business," said Dora, the privacy charms having already been canceled by Harry's departure. "Don't bother him about it."
"Okay."
-----
Lavender Brown had taken one look at Hermione Granger and decided "that girl needs friends."To be fair, she wasn't wrong- Hermione had been isolated pretty much since she started school, between her natural inclination towards academic pursuits (helped along by her parents), the social skills of a particularly cuddly spider, and the fact that she had a number of facial features that invited mockery from her peers at school (not to mention her skin color).
Lavender's time in muggle elementary schools had been enlightening on that front- while she was fortunate enough to pass as white, her older sister (currently in Ravenclaw, who she'd almost joined in said house) and some of her cousins weren't, and she saw how differently she was treated than they were.
So, seeing the similarities between the isolation that her family experienced and the form that Hermione likely did, she decided that she was going to make friends with the bushy-haired girl.
Of course, just because she'd decided something didn't mean it was going to come into existence, much to her chagrin (and her parents' occasional relief). This was definitively proven to be true in this case- while there was some commonality of experience between Lavender and Hermione, it wasn't enough to ensure her subtle (that is, subtle for an eleven-year-old British schoolgirl) overtures. After all, the daughter of two dentists and the daughter of a Squib cosmetologist and a foreign witch didn't have much in common to begin with, aside from a general feeling of alien-ness in the British Wizarding World, and that wasn't enough to overcome Hermione's reclusive nature.
Fortunately, Lavender had a solution for that, once she hit her limit just over a full month into the term.
"This is Binky," said Lavender, unceremoniously dropping the brown-furred bunny in Hermione's lap. "You've been studying for too long, take a ten minute Bunny Break."
"I beg your pardon?" asked Hermione, clearly building up a head of steam.
"Then beg." Lavender's response startled Hermione, leaving her blinking owlishly as she tried to recalibrate her expectations for the conversation as it took an abrupt turn after disrupting her studies.
"Anyways, you look like you're getting a little too wound up. Everyone knows that studying is more effective when you balance it out with fun, like cuddling a cute bunny." Lavender's words prompted Hermione to look down on Binky, eyes resembling nothing so much as the soil of a freshly overwatered vegetable garden, before she sighed and gave in to her instincts, gently scratching the bunny behind the ears.
"If you wanted me to take a break, you could have just asked," huffed Hermione.
"Would you have listened?" asked Lavender, eyebrows raised for effect.
Instead of answering verbally, Hermione just glared, to all the effect of a cool breeze attempting to batter down the walls of Hogwarts Castle.
"Thought so. Now then, once you're done with your break, pull out your transfiguration essay. I want to see how your views of Switch's concept of the inherent form of an object match up with mine." Seeing Hermione's face light up at the prospect of academic discussion gave Lavender warm fuzzies inside and she smiled, flush with the accomplishment of her goal.
-----
And that's that!I have no idea what I'm doing with Harry's character, I just hope he isn't too inconsistent. Speaking of character… how do write eleven year old?
Ah, well. It's not like I was super attached to canonical characterizations anyways.
Next chapter is probably gonna have at least some Sirius (and also might not be for a while, as the muse demands).
That's it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
Attempted Shearing
- Pronouns
- She/They
Just getting out of the hospital and Sirius is already getting fleeced…
This will not be a Honks story- I don't have anything against the ship in general, I'm just not willing to do that here given what I've already written.
To the clown bitching about me including Lavender and Hermione instead of just "finding a huddle puff to stick to him"... lol. Lmao, even. You have all the disdain that my cold, black heart can offer (and, between you and me, that's a lot).
Part of that was that he didn't want to acknowledge all the ones that had gone the way of James and Lily, like Marlene or Dorcas, and all the others who hadn't survived the upheaval after that Halloween. Eventually, he'd go and visit James and Lily's grave, but… he wasn't ready, not now when everything was so fresh, and he was being overwhelmed by both being outside of Azkaban and the decade he was catching up on.
Part of that was that he wasn't willing to look any of the survivors in the face, the ones who wrote him off as the one who betrayed James and Lily without so much as a backwards glance as if they weren't the closest thing to family he had anymore, without introducing said face to his fist, repeatedly and strenuously.
It was nothing more than a miracle that he could do so- he'd been ready for physical therapy mere days after Dora left for Hogwarts instead of the weeks that the doctors had promised, and by the time that the three-week estimate for him being ready for physical therapy rolled around, he was all but ready to be discharged from Saint Mungo's, and there he was forced to confront the reality of the people who had abandoned him to the dementors' alleged mercies (which were not, in fact, tender by any stretch of the imagination).
It wasn't a full gathering of the Order, no, just a small group of members that were wholly loyal to Dumbledore. Most of the others had sent letters, of one stripe or another, with Emmeline Vance's at least mentioning repeated petitions sent to the Ministry for Sirius' trial transcripts that had come back denied with Crouch's stamp on them even after he'd been demoted to the DIMC.
(The lack of a letter from Remus was as baffling as it was painful for Sirius.)
"Diggle. Doge. Podmore. You couldn't have written ahead?" He offered Figg a nod, as she'd done so, even if half of the letter had been about her cats.
"Apologies, Black," said Elphias Doge, with the same imperious tone that Sirius remembered from ten years and a lifetime ago, even if the conical hat the man had taken to wearing at the time (which made him look like nothing so much as a particularly ugly specimen of garden gnome) had been changed out for something that at first glance (and second, third, fourth, and perhaps even fifth, depending on how charitable the glancer was inclined to be) looked to be a particularly large fly's abdomen perched atop his head. "Dumbledore insisted on secrecy."
"Lie, try again," Sirius responded, the odd not-quite-instincts of the Family Magics telling him that that was a lie with only a little more certainty than his own mind.
The older man's jaw visibly tightened. "I'm trying to be charitable here, Black." He made a production of looking Sirius up and down. "You look good, too good. Did you even go to Azkaban, or were you just being sheltered by Malfoy?" He practically spat the last word.
Sirius blinked slowly, nostrils flaring as he fought down the instincts that told him to turn into Padfoot and bowl the man over, hospital waiting room be damned.
"I'm going to ignore that," Sirius returned, cutting off Arabella Figg's incipient angry rant at the knees. "You know very well where I was for the past decade, mister 'Special Advisor to the Wizengamot'."
Something in Sirius' tone of voice made Doge take a step back and visibly reassess his position. "Ah. My apologies, Black," he said.
"Good. Now then, we can talk about this over lunch- I've been hankering for a good burger for the past week, and I know this great American-style diner that shouldn't throw up too much of a fuss if we rent out one of the back rooms on short notice." Left unsaid was that he was already planning to go to this diner, which was wholly owned by the Black family through Marius Black's son, Michael (considered a Muggleborn by the magical world at large, who Sirius'd taken back into the family along with Marius the first week he was out of Azkaban).
"By all means," said Figg, gathering up her purse and shooting a grateful look at Sirius for offering an out, "lead the way.
That said, Sirius could only stretch out a burger and fries out so far, and with one last belch, he turned his gaze to Doge's face and the attendant expression of disdain, bringing his half-drunk strawberry milkshake down to the table with a heavy clunk that belied the amount he'd already had. "So, old man Doge," Sirius said, noting the twitch the older wizard's eye made at that, "tell me, what does Dumbledore want from me this time?"
"Why, Sirius, I'm hurt you'd think that of me! I would never be so crass as to-" Doge began.
Sirius raised his hand, and the other man stopped. "Please, Doge, you've never been comfortable around the Blacks, and the only reason you'd bother to spend time around me that wasn't mid-battle is if Dumbledore says it's important."
Doge's face scrunched up with anger, but he couldn't dispute Sirius' declaration.
"Thought so. Now then, tell me, what is it that Dumbledore wants so badly that he's willing to send you to do it, but not enough to leave Hogwarts to do it himself?" asked Sirius, gray eyes glinting with intensity and, perhaps, a glimmer that is is most associated, in their minds, with Bellatrix Lestrange.
"He insists that Harry's living situation remain as it is, due to the nature of some of the… protections… that have been laid over his current living space," said Elphias Doge, not so much visibly nervous as less full of brash confidence than he had been before. "Before you ask, I'm not privy to the, ah, exact details of the protections in question, but I have full confidence in Albus Dumbledore and his magical abilities to protect any child, even the Boy-Who-Lived."
Sirius just sighed, fisting his hands hard enough his bones creaked momentarily before splaying them as far as he could. "I take it none of you have taken a look at the house, have you." It wasn't a question.
"He may not be loved as well as the other boy who lives there, but he's… he's got a good life," said Figg, quietly, and Sirius took a moment to recall all the rumors he heard about the way that Squibs were treated by the old families to prevent him from blowing his top on the older woman.
While he was doing that, Doge was taking the opportunity to continue digging. "See? If Arabella vouches for the boy's home, then it's perfect for him!"
"I would like to remind you," growled Sirius, with far more of Padfoot's voice than his human one, "that Arabella Figg, inasmuch as she is a truly caring individual, is a Squib child of the Bulstrodes, and her understanding of what is a good life is accordingly skewed. I took the opportunity, when old Mad-Eye sent me a letter, to ask him to check in a couple of places I suspected Harry might have lived, and do you know what he found?"
Apart from the widening of three pairs of eyes (and one, more world-weary pair finding itself more downcast), Sirius didn't get a response.
"Harry was living at Petunia's house, which was explicitly not a place he should have been sent as per James and Lily's wills, and Moody almost missed that he lived there if not for the man's impressively thorough search. He found a cot in a cabinet under the stairs, with old, old bloodstains all over it, and someone had written 'Harry's room' on the wall. He found two other rooms, one guest room that was all but unused, and one room that looked more like a storage area than a bedroom." Sirius made eye contact with Doge, who was at this point about as cool as a frog a good deal of the way through being boiled. "I find myself unwilling to commit to leaving my godson in a place like that, no matter what protections have been laid down."
"I'm sorry," came Figg's response, the only one to come since the other three members of the Order were all struck dumb by Sirius' revelation.
"You, I hold blameless," said Sirius, standing from the table to stare at the other three as if they were acromantula obstructing his view of a wonderful sunset. "Everyone else… think about what you've done, and see if you can live with it."
In his wake, Sirius left an uneasy mood (and a bill that, by unspoken agreement, would fall to Doge).
"And you must be Ted!" This Sirius said to the bronze-skinned man next to Andromeda, whose laugh lines deepened as he smiled to Sirius. "Glad to meet another man willing to thumb their nose at the 'proper pureblood elite'," he continued, affecting a posh accent on the last three words before scrunching up his face in disdain as manufactured as anti-queer sentiment.
"It's nice to finally meet my wife's favorite cousin," the man replied in a voice as smooth as the feeling of rubbing a well-made plushie on one's face. "Andi's told me a little bit about you as you were as a kid, but… well, life changes us all," he said, wincing as he realized what he was saying.
Sirius took it in good humor, at least. "Eh, some of us more than others. I'm still as stubborn as a dog with a bone, not quite housebroken, and deeply opposed to everything ol' Lucy did in the war. I may be taller, and more roguishly handsome, but the core of me is still the same."
"Speaking of things being the same," said Andromeda, smoothly slipping into the space after Sirius' statement, "I hope you have the same taste in curry you did before we both left the main family, as I made Uncle Alphard's recipe."
Sirius' smile softened from the brash, almost larger-than-life grin of someone all but daring the world to try him into something that, while not necessarily more honest, was more vulnerable. "Andy, cousin mine, you are an absolute angel, and for you I would plunge back into the heart of Azkaban."
She chuckled, then patted his (all too hollow) cheek affectionately. "And you, cousin mine, are entirely too skinny. Whatever they fed you in the hospital clearly wasn't enough."
"You can say that again," Sirius replied. "I went out to the Padded Foot today, and even after one of their burgers I was all but starving."
"Oh, well if even one of Michael's burgers couldn't solve the problem all the way, then we need to intervene stat," said Andromeda. "Let's get you sat down so we can stuff you as full as we can get."
Over the course of the night, the haunted look behind Sirius' eyes didn't go away completely, but Andromeda was very much relieved to see it making a rather solid go at disappearing with the sunlight.
Not going to lie, I completely forgot to update yesterday. My bad!
Finally gotten settled in (well, for a given value of settled in) to my new residence, hopefully I'll get in some more writing this next week before things pick back up.
If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko-fi (Buy Lucifra a Coffee. ko-fi.com/lucifra) and a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Lucifra), and if you become a patron, you can see my chapters a week early.
Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin and Ember for being patrons!
I have a discord sir ver for author stuff - if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct answer to, that's another option:
discord.gg
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
-----
Okay, so. Some notes based on the reviews I've gotten.This will not be a Honks story- I don't have anything against the ship in general, I'm just not willing to do that here given what I've already written.
To the clown bitching about me including Lavender and Hermione instead of just "finding a huddle puff to stick to him"... lol. Lmao, even. You have all the disdain that my cold, black heart can offer (and, between you and me, that's a lot).
-----
Sirius hadn't been able to bring himself to go out of his way to look into the surviving members of the Order of the Phoenix until now.Part of that was that he didn't want to acknowledge all the ones that had gone the way of James and Lily, like Marlene or Dorcas, and all the others who hadn't survived the upheaval after that Halloween. Eventually, he'd go and visit James and Lily's grave, but… he wasn't ready, not now when everything was so fresh, and he was being overwhelmed by both being outside of Azkaban and the decade he was catching up on.
Part of that was that he wasn't willing to look any of the survivors in the face, the ones who wrote him off as the one who betrayed James and Lily without so much as a backwards glance as if they weren't the closest thing to family he had anymore, without introducing said face to his fist, repeatedly and strenuously.
It was nothing more than a miracle that he could do so- he'd been ready for physical therapy mere days after Dora left for Hogwarts instead of the weeks that the doctors had promised, and by the time that the three-week estimate for him being ready for physical therapy rolled around, he was all but ready to be discharged from Saint Mungo's, and there he was forced to confront the reality of the people who had abandoned him to the dementors' alleged mercies (which were not, in fact, tender by any stretch of the imagination).
It wasn't a full gathering of the Order, no, just a small group of members that were wholly loyal to Dumbledore. Most of the others had sent letters, of one stripe or another, with Emmeline Vance's at least mentioning repeated petitions sent to the Ministry for Sirius' trial transcripts that had come back denied with Crouch's stamp on them even after he'd been demoted to the DIMC.
(The lack of a letter from Remus was as baffling as it was painful for Sirius.)
"Diggle. Doge. Podmore. You couldn't have written ahead?" He offered Figg a nod, as she'd done so, even if half of the letter had been about her cats.
"Apologies, Black," said Elphias Doge, with the same imperious tone that Sirius remembered from ten years and a lifetime ago, even if the conical hat the man had taken to wearing at the time (which made him look like nothing so much as a particularly ugly specimen of garden gnome) had been changed out for something that at first glance (and second, third, fourth, and perhaps even fifth, depending on how charitable the glancer was inclined to be) looked to be a particularly large fly's abdomen perched atop his head. "Dumbledore insisted on secrecy."
"Lie, try again," Sirius responded, the odd not-quite-instincts of the Family Magics telling him that that was a lie with only a little more certainty than his own mind.
The older man's jaw visibly tightened. "I'm trying to be charitable here, Black." He made a production of looking Sirius up and down. "You look good, too good. Did you even go to Azkaban, or were you just being sheltered by Malfoy?" He practically spat the last word.
Sirius blinked slowly, nostrils flaring as he fought down the instincts that told him to turn into Padfoot and bowl the man over, hospital waiting room be damned.
"I'm going to ignore that," Sirius returned, cutting off Arabella Figg's incipient angry rant at the knees. "You know very well where I was for the past decade, mister 'Special Advisor to the Wizengamot'."
Something in Sirius' tone of voice made Doge take a step back and visibly reassess his position. "Ah. My apologies, Black," he said.
"Good. Now then, we can talk about this over lunch- I've been hankering for a good burger for the past week, and I know this great American-style diner that shouldn't throw up too much of a fuss if we rent out one of the back rooms on short notice." Left unsaid was that he was already planning to go to this diner, which was wholly owned by the Black family through Marius Black's son, Michael (considered a Muggleborn by the magical world at large, who Sirius'd taken back into the family along with Marius the first week he was out of Azkaban).
"By all means," said Figg, gathering up her purse and shooting a grateful look at Sirius for offering an out, "lead the way.
-----
The hushed conversation that Figg had with Doge while they walked the five minutes from Saint Mungo's to the Padded Foot Diner (to be quite honest, Sirius had never been the best at naming, and it was just a coincidence that this diner was owned by Michael Black, at least as far as any mortal involved in the situation could tell you) did a great deal for the man's manners, or at least his sense of restraint.That said, Sirius could only stretch out a burger and fries out so far, and with one last belch, he turned his gaze to Doge's face and the attendant expression of disdain, bringing his half-drunk strawberry milkshake down to the table with a heavy clunk that belied the amount he'd already had. "So, old man Doge," Sirius said, noting the twitch the older wizard's eye made at that, "tell me, what does Dumbledore want from me this time?"
"Why, Sirius, I'm hurt you'd think that of me! I would never be so crass as to-" Doge began.
Sirius raised his hand, and the other man stopped. "Please, Doge, you've never been comfortable around the Blacks, and the only reason you'd bother to spend time around me that wasn't mid-battle is if Dumbledore says it's important."
Doge's face scrunched up with anger, but he couldn't dispute Sirius' declaration.
"Thought so. Now then, tell me, what is it that Dumbledore wants so badly that he's willing to send you to do it, but not enough to leave Hogwarts to do it himself?" asked Sirius, gray eyes glinting with intensity and, perhaps, a glimmer that is is most associated, in their minds, with Bellatrix Lestrange.
"He insists that Harry's living situation remain as it is, due to the nature of some of the… protections… that have been laid over his current living space," said Elphias Doge, not so much visibly nervous as less full of brash confidence than he had been before. "Before you ask, I'm not privy to the, ah, exact details of the protections in question, but I have full confidence in Albus Dumbledore and his magical abilities to protect any child, even the Boy-Who-Lived."
Sirius just sighed, fisting his hands hard enough his bones creaked momentarily before splaying them as far as he could. "I take it none of you have taken a look at the house, have you." It wasn't a question.
"He may not be loved as well as the other boy who lives there, but he's… he's got a good life," said Figg, quietly, and Sirius took a moment to recall all the rumors he heard about the way that Squibs were treated by the old families to prevent him from blowing his top on the older woman.
While he was doing that, Doge was taking the opportunity to continue digging. "See? If Arabella vouches for the boy's home, then it's perfect for him!"
"I would like to remind you," growled Sirius, with far more of Padfoot's voice than his human one, "that Arabella Figg, inasmuch as she is a truly caring individual, is a Squib child of the Bulstrodes, and her understanding of what is a good life is accordingly skewed. I took the opportunity, when old Mad-Eye sent me a letter, to ask him to check in a couple of places I suspected Harry might have lived, and do you know what he found?"
Apart from the widening of three pairs of eyes (and one, more world-weary pair finding itself more downcast), Sirius didn't get a response.
"Harry was living at Petunia's house, which was explicitly not a place he should have been sent as per James and Lily's wills, and Moody almost missed that he lived there if not for the man's impressively thorough search. He found a cot in a cabinet under the stairs, with old, old bloodstains all over it, and someone had written 'Harry's room' on the wall. He found two other rooms, one guest room that was all but unused, and one room that looked more like a storage area than a bedroom." Sirius made eye contact with Doge, who was at this point about as cool as a frog a good deal of the way through being boiled. "I find myself unwilling to commit to leaving my godson in a place like that, no matter what protections have been laid down."
"I'm sorry," came Figg's response, the only one to come since the other three members of the Order were all struck dumb by Sirius' revelation.
"You, I hold blameless," said Sirius, standing from the table to stare at the other three as if they were acromantula obstructing his view of a wonderful sunset. "Everyone else… think about what you've done, and see if you can live with it."
In his wake, Sirius left an uneasy mood (and a bill that, by unspoken agreement, would fall to Doge).
-----
"Andy, how nice to see you outside of the hospital gaslamps!" Sirius shook his favorite cousin's hand vigorously, the flat look he'd borne earlier that day traded out for a genuine smile that, with the addition of face paint and the glint of madness in the eyes, wouldn't have been out of place on a Joker cosplay."And you must be Ted!" This Sirius said to the bronze-skinned man next to Andromeda, whose laugh lines deepened as he smiled to Sirius. "Glad to meet another man willing to thumb their nose at the 'proper pureblood elite'," he continued, affecting a posh accent on the last three words before scrunching up his face in disdain as manufactured as anti-queer sentiment.
"It's nice to finally meet my wife's favorite cousin," the man replied in a voice as smooth as the feeling of rubbing a well-made plushie on one's face. "Andi's told me a little bit about you as you were as a kid, but… well, life changes us all," he said, wincing as he realized what he was saying.
Sirius took it in good humor, at least. "Eh, some of us more than others. I'm still as stubborn as a dog with a bone, not quite housebroken, and deeply opposed to everything ol' Lucy did in the war. I may be taller, and more roguishly handsome, but the core of me is still the same."
"Speaking of things being the same," said Andromeda, smoothly slipping into the space after Sirius' statement, "I hope you have the same taste in curry you did before we both left the main family, as I made Uncle Alphard's recipe."
Sirius' smile softened from the brash, almost larger-than-life grin of someone all but daring the world to try him into something that, while not necessarily more honest, was more vulnerable. "Andy, cousin mine, you are an absolute angel, and for you I would plunge back into the heart of Azkaban."
She chuckled, then patted his (all too hollow) cheek affectionately. "And you, cousin mine, are entirely too skinny. Whatever they fed you in the hospital clearly wasn't enough."
"You can say that again," Sirius replied. "I went out to the Padded Foot today, and even after one of their burgers I was all but starving."
"Oh, well if even one of Michael's burgers couldn't solve the problem all the way, then we need to intervene stat," said Andromeda. "Let's get you sat down so we can stuff you as full as we can get."
Over the course of the night, the haunted look behind Sirius' eyes didn't go away completely, but Andromeda was very much relieved to see it making a rather solid go at disappearing with the sunlight.
-----
And that's that!Not going to lie, I completely forgot to update yesterday. My bad!
Finally gotten settled in (well, for a given value of settled in) to my new residence, hopefully I'll get in some more writing this next week before things pick back up.
If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko-fi (Buy Lucifra a Coffee. ko-fi.com/lucifra) and a Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Lucifra), and if you become a patron, you can see my chapters a week early.
Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin and Ember for being patrons!
I have a discord sir ver for author stuff - if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct answer to, that's another option:
Join the The Lucifralorn Forest Discord Server!
Check out the The Lucifralorn Forest community on Discord - hang out with 20 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
Fudging the Numbers
- Pronouns
- She/They
Not everyone can keep up with best practices- sometimes, corners must be cut.
To the guest who left the review whining about racial politics and gender and what you assume I'm gonna write in this fic: I genuinely hope that you do enough personal development to move past your preconceptions and prejudices.
He'd never really been a man for physical activity in general- even during his time in the Obliviators, before the encounter with Sirius Black that had made (and was threatening to break) his career, he'd repeatedly expressed gratitude that he'd made a job with the law enforcement power that didn't require the physical fitness of an Auror or a Hit Wizard, and that had only been furthered by his indulgences in the finer things in life in the years since.
That said, he appeared extremely tempted to start pacing now, purely for the way to expel some of the nervous energy that was eating him alive.
"Lucius," Fudge said, a quaver in his voice, "I take it you're, ah, aware of how precarious my position is?"
"No more precarious than Crouch's, surely," Lucius Malfoy said, looking refined and polished in his acromantula silk robes despite his heart having more in common with that of nifflers or perhaps Smaug than the quivering lump of flesh he'd chosen as his catspaw to date (not that he'd ever admit it even if he knew what Smaug was). "He was far more directly culpable in Black's imprisonment, despite your… presence at the scene, and if he were to hold a grudge against anyone over it, he'd be more inclined to pursue Crouch over you."
Malfoy, of course, knew that this was not true. Crouch's decision to imprison Black was driven by a number of factors, including political pressure from Dumbledore and his own, ah, gentle persuasion of Cornelius to seize the opportunity that Black's seeming guilt in a major breach of the Statute of Secrecy brought about.
He'd been well aware of the state of the Black family, having been caught in the Ministry a mere few months before in part because of his desire to scrutinize some of their records on the ancient family. As it turned out, at least according to the records, the Black family was fabulously wealthy and yet had a desperate lack of heirs. Most of its members were aging, even for Wizards, and of those that weren't, Andromeda had been disowned, Bella and Narcissa were firmly under the Dark Lord's and his thumbs, respectively, Regulus had vanished on some sort of mission for the Dark Lord, leaving only Sirius as a major threat to their ability to claim the Black fortune for the pureblood cause.
As such, when the opportunity came, in the form of the Obliviator he'd decided to keep in his hip pocket contacting him to ask what to do after it appeared that Sirius Black was implicated in a major crime, he'd jumped on it with both feet. Arcturus' injuries from his service in Grindelwald's War meant that he wasn't going to be having any more heirs, and with all those that remained (aside from Narcissa and Draco) being either ineligible to inherit, disowned, or imprisoned now that Sirius was handled, and that left all the monies and properties of the Black family on a one-way trip down the line of Malfoy.
Or at least, that's what he thought.
In the months since Arcturus Black died, he had been forced to confront the truth- that being that securing the wealth of the Blacks would be much harder than he'd prefer.
Arcturus Black had not, unfortunately, died without a will, and that will was the sticking point.
He hadn't, as Lucius expected, accepted the standard heirship inheritances, which would be child's play to subvert- after all, the existing heir was imprisoned until such time as he may pass through the Veil of his own volition, and good riddance, so making the claim that Narcissa (and thus Draco, since after he'd dosed her surreptitiously with several potions that induced enough scarring on her womb to make having another child impossible) was the only viable heir to the family. He'd barely have to bribe anyone, just a few Galleons to anyone who was willing to kick up a fuss about the blood traitor, her mudblood husband, and the unfortunate changeling they'd spawned.
The mudblood hadn't made any friends among the Wizengamot, what with representing others of his ilk and assorted degenerates for a pittance, so the convincing wouldn't have been particularly hard, if Lucius had had the chance to execute it in the first place.
Unfortunately, Black was a cunning old bastard, and had tied the entire Black Estate to the recognition of the Black Family Magics as Head of the Family, which an off-the-books visit to Azkaban confirmed fell to the blood traitor.
Truth be told, even that wasn't insurmountable, given enough time- if he'd had the time to have a proper forgery commissioned, based on the original will, or even convince the Wizengamot to make it illegal for denizens of Azkaban to inherit, he'd have been in the clear to hand over the goblins' largest held vault to his Lord upon his return.
But no, the changeling bitch had to ruin that by invoking the Family Magics.
Now, Black was free, and with the force that was the Black Family Magics in his corner, it would be all but impossible to circumvent him again, and a paid off nurse from Saint Mungo's confirmed that the changeling had been the Black heir, so compromising her was right out.
So, that left them as they were: niffler-furred and desperately trying to shave enough off that Black wouldn't notice, or at least comment on it.
Fortunately, Dumbledore was a far more visible target for Black's wrath.
"Ah… are you sure?" simpered Fudge, a sheen of sweat gathering along his temples and forehead.
"Absolutely," lied Malfoy, feeling no guilt at lying to the ostensible head of state of Magical Britain. "But, for the sake of your nerves, I'm sure that I could, ah, make sure to lay some trails that would divert Black's attention away from us."
Lucius Malfoy was, in this case (as in many others), lying like a cat in a sunbeam. He had no more intention to actually help Cornelius to cover his crimes than he had mudbloods for affair partners (not to say that he didn't have any affair partners, just that their blood was clean, in his eyes at least). That said, given the, ah, procedural irregularities surrounding Dumbledore's involvement with both Black's trial and the Potter brat's placement, Black was sure to dive down those jarvey holes instead of hunt for the gnomes nibbling at his outlying cabbages, and the sighting of him storming out of the Muggle restaurant where he had dragged Dumbledore's pet functionary and his entourage into seemed a good sign in that direction.
Fudge seemed to deflate, stress lines smoothing over as his grimace turned from the man's expression of concern to what he called a smile. "Thank you, Lucius, my friend. I'll, ah, let you get to it."
"Thank you, Minister," said Malfoy, inclining his head. "I do so hope that you'll bring your lady wife around for tea this weekend?"
"Always, Lucius," Fudge replied. "You and your wife are the best hosts, and I very much do look forwards to it."
"Until then." Malfoy bowed out of the Minister's office (a touch more literally than he'd prefer- he was a Malfoy, he bowed to no man) and made his way out of the Ministry, plotting all the while.
While the addition to his Lord's war chest that was the Black Family Estate was out of reach, that was by no means the only option that he could seize control of- plenty of Pureblood lines were teetering on the edge of annihilation, and while Amelia Bones' existence meant that he couldn't get his hands on the orphaned Susan, other families were not nearly so staunch in their resistance of his overtures. For example, Cyrus Greengrass, while not so pliable as his maverick cousin, was eminently predictable thanks to the unfortunate condition his daughter had…
He followed one of the scents down the street, then ducked into a shadow behind a tree, emerging on two legs just in time to meet the man he'd asked to meet him there.
"Black," said Mad-Eye Moody. "Back on your feet?"
"For now, at least," responded Sirius, completing the old call-and-response-style identity confirmation that Moody had insisted on, back during the war. "Might need to get me a new pair of boots, though. My old pair wasn't in my belongings when I checked them out and Robards was looking a little nervous when I did, and I don't know I'd want anything he put his feet in."
"Probably smart," Moody replied, mad eye training itself on Sirius briefly before whizzing back into motion like a fruit fly on a sugar high. "Now then, what is it you wanted me for?"
"Second pair of eyes. I'm checking up on, ah, Harry's guardians, and I want someone to make sure Azkaban didn't scramble my judgment too much." Sirius turned to the house in question, striding towards it even as his wand dropped from his holster into his hand and he flicked it in a circle, pulling a Notice-Me-Not charm around the pair of them as Moody started stumping after him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the neighbors turn away from the window as if someone had warned her that the sewage was about to start backing up into the bathroom and she had to move the towels before they were sprayed with the contents of the sewers.
Number Four Privet Drive didn't look any different than the rest of the houses on the street, but looking at it, Sirius was irrationally convinced that there were old bloodstains and holes in the wall scattered all over it, like if someone had made a lenticular print out of a before and after of a haunted house.
"Well," said Moody, glaring at the house as if that would get it to reveal its secrets (which, to be fair, had worked before, and not just on people), "there are definitely wards here. Don't tell me what diagnostic spell you're casting, for the sake of independent results."
"Right, yeah," said Sirius, waving his wand in a distinctly different pattern than Moody did.
Neither of them were particularly pleased with the results.
"Whatever protections he was trying to place," said Moody, "they weren't powered properly, that much I can tell."
"No shit they weren't powered properly," growled Sirius, teeth lengthening slightly within his mouth and specks of light appearing in his eyes. "The daft bastard tried to use a temporary protection permanently by peeling the Potter Family Magics away from Harry and trying to use them as a damn power source."
Moody blinked. "He what." His voice was flat and rough, as if someone had taken a chisel to carve away any sort of emotions.
"He tried to use the Potter Family Magics to power a Notice Me Not-based protection, which failed because the Family Magics were already in use elsewhere." Sirius ran his hand through his hair, growling almost animalistically in frustration. "He doesn't know the first fucking thing about Family Magics, and it really shows."
"I mean, how hard can it be to configure a ward to draw power directly from them?" asked Moody.
"Think less water wheel and more trying to draw power from the waves of the ocean, in the middle of a tropical storm." Moody's eyebrows rose. "They're more force of nature than magical phenomenon, in a way that's… difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have the experience of actually wielding them. Doesn't matter. Point is, I would be very surprised if anyone who hadn't spent a lifetime studying either altering wards or their own Family Magics could use them to power any kind of enchantment without crafting the enchantment whole cloth out of the Family Magics, like some of the Longbottoms' protections are. Merlin, even that would take years, maybe even decades, worth of study before I'd be willing to try it, if I were a Longbottom. The Black Family Magics are… they have different tendencies that leave them less inclined to that kind of construction, let's leave it at that."
Sirius shook himself in a manner eerily like a cat dropped into a tub full of cold water, glaring at the house, with all the impotent fury entailed therein, then frowned, looking first down and then, when that failed to return his mental fur to its previous, drier state, to Moody. "Where was I?"
"Waves of the ocean," grunted Moody.
"Ah. Right. Point is, Dumbledore's actions here show at best dangerous levels of hubris in his attempts to create these wards without a proper understanding of the energies he was working with and negligence in not coming back to make sure the wards were operating as intended."
Moody's face soured as he contemplated the various worse options. "I can sign off on an emergency transfer of custody order with Bones as long as you're okay with Potter staying the break at the school- it'll take about that long to sneak it past Malfoy and his ilk, and it should buy you time to get somewhere worth calling a home."
Sirius offered one last sullen glower to the house, his temper cooling like the last moments of twilight, then he sighed. "That's… probably wise. I'd sooner burn Grimmauld down than try to raise a child there, so I'll see about finding a house or a flat that isn't stuffed to the gills with who knows what, these days."
"Stay safe, Black," said Moody, nodding briefly. "I'll tell Podmore you said hello."
The mention of the blonde WEA proctor brought something else to Sirius' mind- or rather, someone else. "Hey, Moody. You know what's up with Remus? The owl I tried to send him came back unopened."
Moody frowned. "Not since… July of '81, I think. No, April. Dumbledore told me he was going deep cover in the werewolf clans in July, but I hadn't seen him since he led off Yaxley after that mess in Kilwinning."
Sirius, too, frowned. "Huh. I'll see if I can't shake things up and see if he falls out."
Moody snorted. "He'll show up. Hell, if half the stories Podmore told me were true, he's likely to show up on his own, to rein you in if nothing else."
"One can hope, Moody. Good night."
"Don't chase your tail too much, mutt," said Moody.
"I can make you no promises- if I'm not on my own tail, who would be?"
With that, the two men parted ways once again- Moody to the Ministry, and Sirius to try and hunt down a ledger with all the Black family properties.
If I didn't call it here, dollars to donuts it would blow up on me. Well, more than it already tried to- there was supposed to be a Dora scene here.
Next chapter, whenever it comes, should be back to Hogwarts.
If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko-fi (Buy Lucifra a Coffee. ko-fi.com/lucifra) and a Patreon (Lucifra | Patreon), and if you become a patron, you can see my chapters a week early.
Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin and Ember for being patrons!
I also have a discord sir ver for author stuff- if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct , that's another option: Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!
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Content warning: Lucius Malfoy. His internal monologue is scummier and more slur-y than I was expecting, especially since this was supposed to be a Fudge POV.To the guest who left the review whining about racial politics and gender and what you assume I'm gonna write in this fic: I genuinely hope that you do enough personal development to move past your preconceptions and prejudices.
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Cornelius Fudge was not, as a rule, a man given to pacing, thought Lucius Malfoy.He'd never really been a man for physical activity in general- even during his time in the Obliviators, before the encounter with Sirius Black that had made (and was threatening to break) his career, he'd repeatedly expressed gratitude that he'd made a job with the law enforcement power that didn't require the physical fitness of an Auror or a Hit Wizard, and that had only been furthered by his indulgences in the finer things in life in the years since.
That said, he appeared extremely tempted to start pacing now, purely for the way to expel some of the nervous energy that was eating him alive.
"Lucius," Fudge said, a quaver in his voice, "I take it you're, ah, aware of how precarious my position is?"
"No more precarious than Crouch's, surely," Lucius Malfoy said, looking refined and polished in his acromantula silk robes despite his heart having more in common with that of nifflers or perhaps Smaug than the quivering lump of flesh he'd chosen as his catspaw to date (not that he'd ever admit it even if he knew what Smaug was). "He was far more directly culpable in Black's imprisonment, despite your… presence at the scene, and if he were to hold a grudge against anyone over it, he'd be more inclined to pursue Crouch over you."
Malfoy, of course, knew that this was not true. Crouch's decision to imprison Black was driven by a number of factors, including political pressure from Dumbledore and his own, ah, gentle persuasion of Cornelius to seize the opportunity that Black's seeming guilt in a major breach of the Statute of Secrecy brought about.
He'd been well aware of the state of the Black family, having been caught in the Ministry a mere few months before in part because of his desire to scrutinize some of their records on the ancient family. As it turned out, at least according to the records, the Black family was fabulously wealthy and yet had a desperate lack of heirs. Most of its members were aging, even for Wizards, and of those that weren't, Andromeda had been disowned, Bella and Narcissa were firmly under the Dark Lord's and his thumbs, respectively, Regulus had vanished on some sort of mission for the Dark Lord, leaving only Sirius as a major threat to their ability to claim the Black fortune for the pureblood cause.
As such, when the opportunity came, in the form of the Obliviator he'd decided to keep in his hip pocket contacting him to ask what to do after it appeared that Sirius Black was implicated in a major crime, he'd jumped on it with both feet. Arcturus' injuries from his service in Grindelwald's War meant that he wasn't going to be having any more heirs, and with all those that remained (aside from Narcissa and Draco) being either ineligible to inherit, disowned, or imprisoned now that Sirius was handled, and that left all the monies and properties of the Black family on a one-way trip down the line of Malfoy.
Or at least, that's what he thought.
In the months since Arcturus Black died, he had been forced to confront the truth- that being that securing the wealth of the Blacks would be much harder than he'd prefer.
Arcturus Black had not, unfortunately, died without a will, and that will was the sticking point.
He hadn't, as Lucius expected, accepted the standard heirship inheritances, which would be child's play to subvert- after all, the existing heir was imprisoned until such time as he may pass through the Veil of his own volition, and good riddance, so making the claim that Narcissa (and thus Draco, since after he'd dosed her surreptitiously with several potions that induced enough scarring on her womb to make having another child impossible) was the only viable heir to the family. He'd barely have to bribe anyone, just a few Galleons to anyone who was willing to kick up a fuss about the blood traitor, her mudblood husband, and the unfortunate changeling they'd spawned.
The mudblood hadn't made any friends among the Wizengamot, what with representing others of his ilk and assorted degenerates for a pittance, so the convincing wouldn't have been particularly hard, if Lucius had had the chance to execute it in the first place.
Unfortunately, Black was a cunning old bastard, and had tied the entire Black Estate to the recognition of the Black Family Magics as Head of the Family, which an off-the-books visit to Azkaban confirmed fell to the blood traitor.
Truth be told, even that wasn't insurmountable, given enough time- if he'd had the time to have a proper forgery commissioned, based on the original will, or even convince the Wizengamot to make it illegal for denizens of Azkaban to inherit, he'd have been in the clear to hand over the goblins' largest held vault to his Lord upon his return.
But no, the changeling bitch had to ruin that by invoking the Family Magics.
Now, Black was free, and with the force that was the Black Family Magics in his corner, it would be all but impossible to circumvent him again, and a paid off nurse from Saint Mungo's confirmed that the changeling had been the Black heir, so compromising her was right out.
So, that left them as they were: niffler-furred and desperately trying to shave enough off that Black wouldn't notice, or at least comment on it.
Fortunately, Dumbledore was a far more visible target for Black's wrath.
"Ah… are you sure?" simpered Fudge, a sheen of sweat gathering along his temples and forehead.
"Absolutely," lied Malfoy, feeling no guilt at lying to the ostensible head of state of Magical Britain. "But, for the sake of your nerves, I'm sure that I could, ah, make sure to lay some trails that would divert Black's attention away from us."
Lucius Malfoy was, in this case (as in many others), lying like a cat in a sunbeam. He had no more intention to actually help Cornelius to cover his crimes than he had mudbloods for affair partners (not to say that he didn't have any affair partners, just that their blood was clean, in his eyes at least). That said, given the, ah, procedural irregularities surrounding Dumbledore's involvement with both Black's trial and the Potter brat's placement, Black was sure to dive down those jarvey holes instead of hunt for the gnomes nibbling at his outlying cabbages, and the sighting of him storming out of the Muggle restaurant where he had dragged Dumbledore's pet functionary and his entourage into seemed a good sign in that direction.
Fudge seemed to deflate, stress lines smoothing over as his grimace turned from the man's expression of concern to what he called a smile. "Thank you, Lucius, my friend. I'll, ah, let you get to it."
"Thank you, Minister," said Malfoy, inclining his head. "I do so hope that you'll bring your lady wife around for tea this weekend?"
"Always, Lucius," Fudge replied. "You and your wife are the best hosts, and I very much do look forwards to it."
"Until then." Malfoy bowed out of the Minister's office (a touch more literally than he'd prefer- he was a Malfoy, he bowed to no man) and made his way out of the Ministry, plotting all the while.
While the addition to his Lord's war chest that was the Black Family Estate was out of reach, that was by no means the only option that he could seize control of- plenty of Pureblood lines were teetering on the edge of annihilation, and while Amelia Bones' existence meant that he couldn't get his hands on the orphaned Susan, other families were not nearly so staunch in their resistance of his overtures. For example, Cyrus Greengrass, while not so pliable as his maverick cousin, was eminently predictable thanks to the unfortunate condition his daughter had…
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Sirius loped onto Privet Drive, jaws lolling open as he sniffed the air and sneezed- the scents he was hoping to find were present, but sublimated under the stink of the cars and at least one oil leak, neither of which were his favorite things to smell.He followed one of the scents down the street, then ducked into a shadow behind a tree, emerging on two legs just in time to meet the man he'd asked to meet him there.
"Black," said Mad-Eye Moody. "Back on your feet?"
"For now, at least," responded Sirius, completing the old call-and-response-style identity confirmation that Moody had insisted on, back during the war. "Might need to get me a new pair of boots, though. My old pair wasn't in my belongings when I checked them out and Robards was looking a little nervous when I did, and I don't know I'd want anything he put his feet in."
"Probably smart," Moody replied, mad eye training itself on Sirius briefly before whizzing back into motion like a fruit fly on a sugar high. "Now then, what is it you wanted me for?"
"Second pair of eyes. I'm checking up on, ah, Harry's guardians, and I want someone to make sure Azkaban didn't scramble my judgment too much." Sirius turned to the house in question, striding towards it even as his wand dropped from his holster into his hand and he flicked it in a circle, pulling a Notice-Me-Not charm around the pair of them as Moody started stumping after him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the neighbors turn away from the window as if someone had warned her that the sewage was about to start backing up into the bathroom and she had to move the towels before they were sprayed with the contents of the sewers.
Number Four Privet Drive didn't look any different than the rest of the houses on the street, but looking at it, Sirius was irrationally convinced that there were old bloodstains and holes in the wall scattered all over it, like if someone had made a lenticular print out of a before and after of a haunted house.
"Well," said Moody, glaring at the house as if that would get it to reveal its secrets (which, to be fair, had worked before, and not just on people), "there are definitely wards here. Don't tell me what diagnostic spell you're casting, for the sake of independent results."
"Right, yeah," said Sirius, waving his wand in a distinctly different pattern than Moody did.
Neither of them were particularly pleased with the results.
"Whatever protections he was trying to place," said Moody, "they weren't powered properly, that much I can tell."
"No shit they weren't powered properly," growled Sirius, teeth lengthening slightly within his mouth and specks of light appearing in his eyes. "The daft bastard tried to use a temporary protection permanently by peeling the Potter Family Magics away from Harry and trying to use them as a damn power source."
Moody blinked. "He what." His voice was flat and rough, as if someone had taken a chisel to carve away any sort of emotions.
"He tried to use the Potter Family Magics to power a Notice Me Not-based protection, which failed because the Family Magics were already in use elsewhere." Sirius ran his hand through his hair, growling almost animalistically in frustration. "He doesn't know the first fucking thing about Family Magics, and it really shows."
"I mean, how hard can it be to configure a ward to draw power directly from them?" asked Moody.
"Think less water wheel and more trying to draw power from the waves of the ocean, in the middle of a tropical storm." Moody's eyebrows rose. "They're more force of nature than magical phenomenon, in a way that's… difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have the experience of actually wielding them. Doesn't matter. Point is, I would be very surprised if anyone who hadn't spent a lifetime studying either altering wards or their own Family Magics could use them to power any kind of enchantment without crafting the enchantment whole cloth out of the Family Magics, like some of the Longbottoms' protections are. Merlin, even that would take years, maybe even decades, worth of study before I'd be willing to try it, if I were a Longbottom. The Black Family Magics are… they have different tendencies that leave them less inclined to that kind of construction, let's leave it at that."
Sirius shook himself in a manner eerily like a cat dropped into a tub full of cold water, glaring at the house, with all the impotent fury entailed therein, then frowned, looking first down and then, when that failed to return his mental fur to its previous, drier state, to Moody. "Where was I?"
"Waves of the ocean," grunted Moody.
"Ah. Right. Point is, Dumbledore's actions here show at best dangerous levels of hubris in his attempts to create these wards without a proper understanding of the energies he was working with and negligence in not coming back to make sure the wards were operating as intended."
Moody's face soured as he contemplated the various worse options. "I can sign off on an emergency transfer of custody order with Bones as long as you're okay with Potter staying the break at the school- it'll take about that long to sneak it past Malfoy and his ilk, and it should buy you time to get somewhere worth calling a home."
Sirius offered one last sullen glower to the house, his temper cooling like the last moments of twilight, then he sighed. "That's… probably wise. I'd sooner burn Grimmauld down than try to raise a child there, so I'll see about finding a house or a flat that isn't stuffed to the gills with who knows what, these days."
"Stay safe, Black," said Moody, nodding briefly. "I'll tell Podmore you said hello."
The mention of the blonde WEA proctor brought something else to Sirius' mind- or rather, someone else. "Hey, Moody. You know what's up with Remus? The owl I tried to send him came back unopened."
Moody frowned. "Not since… July of '81, I think. No, April. Dumbledore told me he was going deep cover in the werewolf clans in July, but I hadn't seen him since he led off Yaxley after that mess in Kilwinning."
Sirius, too, frowned. "Huh. I'll see if I can't shake things up and see if he falls out."
Moody snorted. "He'll show up. Hell, if half the stories Podmore told me were true, he's likely to show up on his own, to rein you in if nothing else."
"One can hope, Moody. Good night."
"Don't chase your tail too much, mutt," said Moody.
"I can make you no promises- if I'm not on my own tail, who would be?"
With that, the two men parted ways once again- Moody to the Ministry, and Sirius to try and hunt down a ledger with all the Black family properties.
-----
And that's that!If I didn't call it here, dollars to donuts it would blow up on me. Well, more than it already tried to- there was supposed to be a Dora scene here.
Next chapter, whenever it comes, should be back to Hogwarts.
If you want to support me as a writer, I got me a Ko-fi (Buy Lucifra a Coffee. ko-fi.com/lucifra) and a Patreon (Lucifra | Patreon), and if you become a patron, you can see my chapters a week early.
Speaking of which, my thanks to NotableRonin and Ember for being patrons!
I also have a discord sir ver for author stuff- if you have questions or comments that you'd like a more direct , that's another option: Discord - A New Way to Chat with Friends & Communities
That's about it, so read, review, enjoy, and have a nice day!